How I Introduced High Schoolers to a Career in Software Engineering

Recently, I had the rewarding experience of returning to High Tech Los Angeles, my alma mater, to introduce the next generation of high school students to the exciting world of software engineering.

Introduction

My former high school college counselor, Nicole Dorfler, invited me to give a presentation about software engineering for Career Day at my former high school. I was ecstatic to have the opportunity to do so.

The prompt I was given for Career Day was:

We would like you to chat with our students about your college major selection, career path that led to your current occupation, and what you do on a day-to-day basis at your job.

In this blog post I'm going to recap some key details of the presentation.

Before I do that, I'd like to preface with: seeing the High Tech Los Angeles staff was a delightful experience. It is abundantly clear how much the staff truly cares for their students. Both current and former. I'd also like to mention that my high school helped make me the person I am today. And I have the HTLA staff to thank for that. I also must thank the students for being attentive, showing genuine interest, and asking thoughtful questions. It also made me very happy to have students stay after the presentation to get further guidance on their path of software engineering. It was incredibly fulfilling to go back to my high school, 8 years after I graduated, to give a presentation of my career. It was truly a full circle moment.

The Presentation

With that said let's get into it. The presentation format was 20 minutes and done 4 separate times for 4 separate groups of students.

I had a lot of enthusiasm pent up for this, and I wanted to make sure to do my part of making the career path of software engineering an intriguing choice for students. After all, I truly love what I do. Although I did have to contain my enthusiasm, in my first practice run of 12 slides I presented them in 5 minutes. It was clearly information overload. I also had to make sure to take a step back, and communicate in a way that wasn't purely technical. I had to keep in mind the perspective of a high school student.

What Is Coding?

Naturally I gave a brief introduction to what coding is and what you can accomplish with it. From my perspective, coding is the ability to tell a computer what to do via instructions. The truly magical part is you only have to build something once, and from there it's infinitely scalable. Meaning with my finger tips I can build something that the entire world could use.

Extracurricular Activities Do Not Have to Be Formal

HTLA is a small high school. I had a graduating class of about ~80 students. With that comes less options for sports and extracurricular activities. Naturally that can be discouraging to not have many choices that you click with. So a point I wanted to emphasize was anything you do outside of a classroom is an extracurricular activity. It all depends on how you frame it.

An example I gave of an activity I did outside of school was my competitive gaming days. I played competitive Team Fortress 2 in high school, where I assumed a leadership role. I would schedule scrimmages with other teams, coordinating a time and place for 18 people to play. I also organized meetings to prepare for matches and even held retroactives of matches/practices where we would critique our play and grow as a team. In the end our team came in first place in our division of about ~1000 people. Even if this extracurricular at the time was a bit deviated from the norm, I do believe it shows passion and demonstrable leadership skills.

Unfortunately in my head as a high schooler, this wasn't extracurricular at all. It was just a video game, which resulted in me completely leaving it out of my college applications.

I wanted to make sure to give the high school students the perspective that anything you do outside of a classroom is an extracurricular activity. Formal or not.

Getting Started as a Software Engineer

I wanted to make sure to give the students some next steps if they did find some interest in software engineering. I pointed them to r/learnprogramming and ChatGPT. I can see ChatGPT being a controversial resource for people learning to program, but I think as long as students are aware of the potential for mistakes (just like anyone else can make) the ability to have an immediate question and answer resource is invaluable. I can't even imagine being able to start my programming journey with a 1:1 tutor that will explain every line of code for me.

I also gave what I believe is the best advice for anyone interested in coding. Try to build an idea that you're interested in. Me being a bit entrepreneurial and interested in solving people's problems has caused me to spend 1000s of hours on personal projects.

Impostor Syndrome Is Real

I remember when I was attempting to program in high school, everything just felt out of reach. Code just wouldn't click and didn't make sense for me. It caused me to second guess myself a lot. I wanted to emphasize to students that this is completely normal. That you will feel overwhelmed learning new technology because there is so much to grasp. It will take time and be frustrating. Knowing that impostor syndrome is normal in the industry I think helps a lot with the discouraging thoughts.

Building Stuff Is So Freaking Cool

To me the idea of software that I built being used by other people still hypes me up. It's what got me into the field and what keeps me here. There is nothing I enjoy more than making somebody's life slightly better through something I built.

This is a point I wanted to really emphasize. The whole field of software engineering is about building stuff that other people use. If building stuff for others is enjoyable, then it may be a great fit as a career path.

Conclusion

In this presentation I aimed to give a broad overview of software engineering as a career and provide some short and long term guidance.

It was a privilege to present to the students that are currently in the very same position I was just a little less than a decade ago. It really meant a lot to me, and I hope that I positively impacted one of their lives even just a little bit.

Cheers.